I love trees. Don't you love trees, ?

They cuddle us with a sense of both intimacy and grandeur. Infinitely beautiful and unique. The texture under our fingers, the fresh tang or dusky autumnal scent. From my seat right here, I am looking out at a dozen of them, the pale winter sky visible through the bare deciduous branches.

But on Christmas day, one of them attacked us. I happened to be standing at the living room window with a cup of tea, enjoying the sparkling sunshine and absolute calm, when one of the Douglas firs on our driveway took a gentle and meandering swoop. It would have all been very peaceful, except trees are generally expected to stay upright, and it was headed straight for us.

I think I managed some sort of incoherent yell. Our house has two wings, and this was going to land on the other side, where fortunately no one happened to be at the moment. My family members said it sounded like a shelf fell over, but nothing particularly worse than the usual run-of-the-mill daily chaos with a houseful of children. Before I could move from the window, the second Douglas fir gently tipped the other way, lodging itself on an ash tree directly above our pump-house.

We all went running into the family room. I expected sunlight to be pouring in and the ceiling scattered all over the floor. Other people, apparently, thought maybe some of my houseplants had fallen down.

There was one bare branch sticking neatly through the roof, like a knitting needle jabbed into a ball of yarn. It even managed to aim for the part between the blades of the fan. There was a smattering of plaster and insulation on the floor. We texted people in disbelief, and they all wrote back "hopefully it won't rain!" This is Oregon; of course it was going to rain. However, apparently the tree plugged its own hole.

There was nothing more to do about it. We hoped the second tree wouldn't fall any farther, and debated how we could turn off the well and the water for the whole property if the pump house was smashed. (We couldn't.) We played the new Wingspan that one son had gotten another for Christmas. We had Christmas dinner, which ended up very late.

The next day, many very large enormous humungous trucks and cranes cut both trees into pieces and removed them from our houses and vehicles and out of the tree above the pump house. They put a tarp on our roof and the rain doesn't come in. The trees are lying in polite piles of logs at the side of the driveway, thoroughly defeated.

The drama is over, just leaving the bills to be paid. And when are the roofers coming, you might ask? (At least, my children have. Over and over.) I don't even know, because this happened on Christmas and everything has been closed. Meanwhile, I am writing you this newsletter while sitting under a hole in the ceiling. It could have been much worse.

(There are clearly so many pictures that are required to go along with this story, I've put most of them at the end of the newsletter.)

Oh, and also Happy Holiday, New Year, etc. etc.

Wishing you the best times with your families and your furry friends and everything that is appropriate. I've gotten a bunch of newsletters saying that recently, and I'm sure you have too, so just fill in the blanks.....isn't the tree story a little more interesting?

(That is to say, I certainly HOPE all my author friends don't have trees falling on their roofs. Zero stars, do not recommend.)

Okay. Your honest opinion please...

As readers, what do you think of the new Amazon feature of "Ask This Book," where a chat-bot will supposedly answer questions about the book you're reading? All my writer groups are livid about it—the level of trust in the "spoiler-free" premise is pretty thin—but I'm genuinely curious if any readers are excited about this.

And, if you are thinking of finding a different e-reader, I personally love Kobo and Kobo+. I've used them as a reader for years and years, and as a writer I find the platform much more fair. Kobo+ is a subscription service where you pay a monthly fee (lower than KU) and get access to as many books on K+ as you want. Of course, they're not all enrolled, especially traditionally published books, but there's a lot of indie and small press authors on there. There's also no limit to how many books you can have "checked out" at a time.

If you want some inspiration getting started, here's a bunch of fantasy on Kobo+. (The dates are wrong; the link is right.)

Unlimited fantasy on Kobo+

My solstice story is in there, so if you are looking for a different type of holiday read, you can follow the Robinson family to celebrate winter solstice at An Cnoc Rúa in two different millennia. The ancient timeline has an evil sorcerer, which keeps things interesting.

It's officially Book 2, but some readers say it works well to read first. Here's the link on all platforms:

The White Deer of Kildare

If you looking to fill your new e-reader...

Here's a free read that has tree-falling-on-roof vibes.... okay, maybe that's a stretch. But it's moody and lovely and wintery. I am intrigued by the Hungarian folklore. I wonder how similar it would be to Irish folklore?

Read "The Stone Sea"

The magicless days may be over but Zalka’s powers haven’t gotten the memo yet. When the mountain she lives on begins to shake, the Hungarian witch is determined to keep her reclaimed ancestral home from crumbling. 

Determined to stop the quakes, she will follow prophecies of molten metal, hidden paths amid rising boulders, and whispers of an awakening primordial beast. What truly lies beneath the Stone Sea?

Enter a world where the unique supernatural beings of Hungarian folklore are alive — though not always well.

And now for the next adventure...

Our family is headed to Japan! We try to take one big trip a year, to connect the kids with the world. The teens have been begging for this one, and my criteria was just that I'm not dealing with Tokyo with the entire family. 😱 I'm sorry, but that sounds like a nightmare!

So my next couple newsletters might have a lot of pictures of Japan and not much else! We'll see.

We've gone to Ireland and I wrote a whole series of Irish folktales. We went to Türkiye and I have a story set in Istanbul. We'll have to see what happens this time around!

Best wishes,

Christy & the Shelties & the hole in my roof

This is the only dog picture I have lately. My daughter reports that she "has melted Malin."

And now for the roof saga as promised:

It looks so small and innocent, doesn't it?

This is the current state above my head.

This is the leaning tree. That little roof at the bottom is the pump house, which has our well, our water filters, and the controls to the pipes that go all over the property

"Tree, met house."

House: "Delightful. Shall we dance?"

The dastardly trees have been reduced to this pile.

This is a panorama of our front yard, taken from the porch that used to have a tree on it. It already looks so blank and lonely without those two trees in the middle! I'm really going to miss them when the summer comes — although you can see that we still have a couple of trees left!